


nuclear family

by arbitrarily



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-10-24 11:08:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20704982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Marcia sees Shiv out.





	nuclear family

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MySocksDontMatchAndThatsOnPurpose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MySocksDontMatchAndThatsOnPurpose/gifts).

> This is set immediately after the events at Tern Haven in episode 2.05.

The gathering breaks up not long after Logan heads upstairs. 

Shiv loiters, manages to exceed even Tom’s patience. She sends him down to the car with a blunt dismissal not long after both Roman, Tabitha and Gerri in tow, have all gone. After Kendall was summoned upstairs to their father. 

Somehow, much to Shiv’s unpleasantness, it’s just her and Marcia. Marcia, who is eyeing her warily, as if gauging just how much she might be able to get away with. 

She must decide well enough, because without even a brush of small talk she says, “He is very pleased, your father, with this Rhea.” She lends her name the same credence a dumbass in tights would afford the super villain of the week. 

Shiv immediately shrugs her off, looks down instead at the phone in her hand. Marcia should know better by now. Threats never come from the outside; the call is always coming from inside the fucking house. It’s Kendall, it’s Roman. It’s Dad himself.

“Rhea’s been a good ally for us,” Shiv says.

“How magnanimous of her. She runs a charity, yes, and not a major media corporation?”

“What?” Shiv’s attention is split, more focused on her phone's screen than Marcia. An email draft is open, her father the recipient. She deletes the bulk of the text she’s typed with a hard press of her thumb. The tone is wrong. She knows better: he will only reply to strength. She gathers the bitterness within her rather than dismisses it. The humiliation and the disappointment from the weekend still sting fresh. Shiv is not like her brothers; she does not wear her shame proudly. She swallows it down instead, like the worst sort of medicine, and convinces herself she likes the taste. Tells herself she’s done nothing wrong.

“You do not know what it means to live outside your father’s shade,” Marcia is saying. If Shiv didn’t know any better, she’d say there’s a whole lot of something that sounds like empathy in her voice. She thinks; she’s never recognized empathy well, in others or herself. And it’s Marcia—any kindness or grace from her is always laced with just enough bite. She often wonders if Marcia is the sort of woman who doesn’t play well with other women. Shiv, of all women, should be able to recognize one.

But if Shiv knows anything, it’s you don’t trust the stepmother. The fucking Brothers Grimm could tell you that one.

“Yeah? Is that my current address? Outside Dad’s shade?” Whatever the fuck that means.

“You are not careful with the gifts he gives you.”

Shiv takes a step closer to Marcia, her face screwed up in a faux-friendly frown. “Now, see, my understanding? Most people? When they give someone a gift? They don’t take it back. They especially don’t try to take it back, like a fucking thief in the night, and then refuse to so much as talk to you to explain whether this gift was really and truly taken back or maybe just borrowed or if it was even given in the first place.”

Marcia shakes her head, like Shiv's the one who doesn't get it. “Of all the things he taught you, you have yet to learn how to live by his rules.”

Shiv’s eyebrows shoot up her forehead. “Look, Marcia. All due respect? But you missed out on the formative fucking years in the Roy household. You came in on the tail wind. We were grown. Gone. No one was home. It was you and it was Dad and then it was us coming home for Christmas and we all were expected to play happy families with a woman we didn’t know. And, who didn’t know us. You still don’t know us.”

“I have come to know you all very well, Siobhan. I know you like to see me as the enemy.”

Shiv shrugs. “I’m already wearing the glass slipper. Figured we might as well finish the story.”

“Then you better find a better prince, before you turn into a pumpkin.” Off Shiv’s frown, Marcia shrugs. “I confess, I do not know the story well. I have never bothered much with fairy tales.”

“No, why would you,” Shiv says drily. 

“How is your brother?” The sudden change in conversation catches Shiv, her focus now fully on Marcia.

“Uh, which one? I have three.” It’s unnecessary to ask; she knows who Marcia meant. Kendall. Shiv isn’t an idiot. She didn’t miss the attention Marcia settled on him up at the Hamptons. The fucking Hamptons—it feels like a lifetime ago. Maybe all broken promises have the long and tired feel of ancient history. She can still see it, her father’s office, entrance allowed only upon his invitation. So much of the world he built is fashioned the same way: you can only enter at his word. She has waited so long for that word. Her entire life, even. And she was so foolish. She never once paused to consider that once the word was said it could also be taken back. It’s not like the things other people say. It’s not a real promise. He’s Logan Roy. Unlike the rest of the world, he can take his word and he can render it unsaid. 

Shiv's eyes dart down and she hits _send_ on the email. She looks up at Marcia. “He’s fine, I guess. I don’t know. I’m not his keeper.” She turns towards the elevator even though Kendall went upstairs and then back at Marcia. “He was just here, if you wanted to ask him yourself.”

Marcia’s face does that gentling thing it does sometimes. Like she knows some base human secret that Shiv either has to live a great many years to unlock or maybe lacks the brainpower or compassion or what-the-fuck-ever to grasp Marcia’s truths of the fucking universe.

“Yes,” she says. “I did not get a chance to speak with him unfortunately.”

Despite herself, Shiv’s thoughts turn again to Kendall in their father’s office. His weird vulnerability, an openness she has only ever been able to regard as a target, something to shoot at. She can’t remember the last time they leveled with each other like that. When there wasn’t another layer beneath it, the truth hiding like a prize to be dug for and salvaged. Maybe when they were younger. She can remember being sixteen, at home from Exeter for Thanksgiving. Or was she fifteen? She can’t remember. But she was in a mood, she was a teenager, her idea of rebellion was shouting down anything Logan believed in. She thought she knew more than she possibly did. Dad was talking about the invasion of Iraq. She remembers that much. And she was smarting off to him, had the temerity to insult his good friend Donald Rumsfeld and his even better friend Dick Cheney. It’s laughable now, almost. Then, Logan’s face had purpled and his rage was like another person present in the kitchen with them all—a dangerous intruder. The worst of it all is she can’t even remember what she said specifically to earn it. But for the first—and the only—time in her life, he hit her. An open slap across the face, the sound of his palm meeting her cheek louder than it was painful. Nothing like the backhands or the force Roman sometimes received, but that didn’t matter. It was more humiliating than anything. What came next was even worse—Kendall knocking over his chair, rushing at their father, spitting a fury that had felt outsized even then. The violence contained in that room, the fear alive in her as much as curiosity. What could happen next. What was their father capable of. What were they. Marcia was there. She can’t remember if she said anything. Did anything. She wonders now how you can see a thing like that and then claim Logan’s children don’t know him. 

Marcia sighs. The sound is wrong, beleaguered and tired, coming from her. “_Tout finit_,” she says softly. Shiv wishes she could better parse the emotion in Marcia’s face, but there’s nothing there to read. Her face is a brick wall, and if they were different women, if they were close, Shiv might ask her when she built it. How she learned. If anyone has ever gotten past it. If they were different women, she supposes, maybe the wall would not have been built. “I know what it means to hold on, but I also know when to let go. I remind myself of this this daily, and I prepare. You would do well to learn the same.”

Shiv frowns, a line indented between her eyebrows. “You and Dad,” Shiv gestures towards the stairs. “You’re fine, right?” The kangaroo court of the dinner table under Nan Pierce’s jurisdiction had more than its fair share of distractions, but she can recall the tension between her father and Marcia. She can’t figure out when that started, if it was a product of the trip to Tern Haven or if much like Marcia’s implacable expression on her face, it has been building for a long time.

“You do not wear compassion well. Least of all for me. It is nothing to concern yourself with.”

“I mean, you’re the one who brought it up, but whatever.”

Marcia wraps an arm around her middle, her stance defensive and hunted at the same time. “He courts wisdom from fools and then questions the judgment to come.” She doesn’t have the ear of the king anymore, that’s what this is about. Shiv resists the urge to roll her eyes. 

“You putting the dunce cap on me, Marcia?” 

Marcia gives a dismissive wave of her hand. “He looks to outsiders, to his own peril.” Marcia says _outsiders_ like it is the worst insult she can muster. And Shiv knows who they are talking about now: Rhea, again.

“Right,” Shiv says, for lack of anything else. She glances back at the elevator again. “Tom’s at the car, I should go.”

“I just ask that you should be careful.”

“With who?” Kendall? Her father?

“Yourself.”

“Don’t you want me to fail?” Shiv says, dangerously quiet. “Don’t you want us all to fail? One fell swoop, it's all yours.”

“You think so little, so unkindly, of me.”

“Hardly. You should be flattered." Shiv flashes her teeth in something that could technically be classified as a smile. "You have to be cutthroat to recognize a fellow mercenary.”

And Shiv can see it. There’s more Marcia wishes to say, but she chooses to say nothing. She nods her head. “You said Tom is waiting? Then, yes, Siobhan. You should go.”

Shiv steps into the elevator. Only once the doors have closed does she let her shoulders slump. Her posture weakens and she leans back against the wall. Against her restraint, her imagination wanders back to that dinner table. Tern Haven. The Pierces, their cruelty lean and Puritan stark beneath a rapidly deteriorating hospitality. The betrayed look of surprise on both her brothers’ faces. She had expected her father’s rage. She looks down at the phone in her hand and refreshes it. Nothing. His silence is worse.


End file.
